Bloom’s Taxonomy is a seminal framework for classifying educational objectives and learning goals into hierarchical levels of cognitive complexity. Initially developed by the eminent academic educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues in the 1950s working out of the University of Chicago and later revised to reflect more modern educational practices, this taxonomy applies to various fields, including fashion marketing. The taxonomy consists of six levels representing increasing complexity: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (Nayef et al., 2013; Waheed et al., 2021).

Here is how Bloom’s Taxonomy can be synthesised with the SOSTAC model of Marketing Communications (Smith, 2011), which I use as inspiration for several assessment briefs. 

1. Knowledge

In postgraduate-level fashion marketing, the knowledge level encompasses an understanding of marketing communications, branding, consumer behaviour theories, core terminology, and foundational marketing concepts. 

2. Comprehension

At the comprehension level, students should be able to articulate their understanding of fashion marketing principles and theories. This could involve summarising case studies of successful marketing campaigns and explaining concepts such as target audience segmentation. This stage correlates with the situation analysis section of the SOSTAC model, which I use to structure several of my unit plans. In this stage, students also understand the challenges and opportunities faced by the brand and can start to relate this to their research design. 

3. Application

The application requires students to use their knowledge and understanding in practical scenarios. In the context of the units I lead, this equates to the primary research design, whereby Master’s students explore a research question related to the identified weakness or opportunity. 

4. Analysis

At the analysis level, students analyse their primary research – in terms of qualitative data, using thematic analysis (Saldana, 2021). 

5. Synthesis

Synthesis in my taught units involves students developing comprehensive marketing and branding communications strategies. Students ideate strategic recommendations and create visual mock-ups for their plans.  

6. Evaluation

Finally, evaluation represents the highest order of cognitive learning in Bloom’s Taxonomy. 

According to recent assessment briefs I have written, at this stage, students discuss risks and make a persuasive case for their integrated marketing communications plan and discuss the return on investment.

Figure 1. Bloom’s Taxonomy Planning Verbs (TeachThought Staff, 2014)

References

Bloom, B.S. (ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay.

Nayef, E. G., Yaacob, N. R. N., & Ismail, H. N. (2013). Taxonomies of educational objective domain. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 3(9). https://doi.org/10.6007/ijarbss/v3-i9/199

Saldana, J. (2021). The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Limited.

Smith, P.R. and Zook, Z. (2011) Marketing Communications: Integrating Offline and Online with Social Media. 5th edn. London: Kogan Page.

TeachThought Staff, T. (2024) 126 Bloom’s taxonomy verbs for digital learning, TeachThought. Available at: https://www.teachthought.com/critical-thinking/blooms-taxonomy-verbs-2/ (Accessed: 25 March 2025). 

Waheed, A., Goyal, M., Mittal, N., Gupta, D., Khanna, A., & Sharma, M. (2021). Bloomnet: a robust transformer based model for bloom’s learning outcome classification.. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2108.07249